So here's a FFIII change I haven't seen mentioned anywhere:
Haste and Protect used to stack, now they don't. They also wear off after a few turns and have such a minor effect that it's not really all that distinguishable from normal damage variance. Having any meaningful buffs available sure would have helped against the obnoxiously bloated HP pools of all the endgame bosses!
It's also kind of an issue because FFIII's spell list was probably the most boring selection in the series even when those were actually good. Status effects are meaningless, because this is the first game where they just made every boss immune to everything (Though thankfully that's not always the case in future entries), and enemies die too quickly for them to matter even after basically everything had its HP doubled. There's one other buff (Reflect - which is okay, but really fiddly and extremely situational), but everything else is just straightforward damage or recovery.
I've never really liked FFIII all that much, and this hasn't really changed my opinion on it. This version of the job system always felt like it's largely smoke and mirrors - you just use what the game tells you to use, either explicitly via NPCs or implicitly via the equipment options that are available, and numbers are tuned way too high to allow for much deviation from the intended solution without loads of grinding. Someone compared it to FFIV earlier, and I think that's accurate. It's just that FFIV takes the extra step and actually forces you to use a specific party rather than being coy about it.
I also don't find the game to be difficult in any kind of interesting way, since it mostly just stems from bosses two-shotting your entire party if you're slightly underleveled, so you just die if the boss acts after your healers one turn and before your healers the next. But to be fair this is more of an issue with the remaster now that Protect is so much worse.
Anyway, I'm done with all of these now. I think they look and sound great, but the mechanical changes have largely been bizarre/irrelevant or have made the games worse IMO. Most people aren't even going to notice a lot of them, so I don't really understand why they even bothered. It just seemed completely random which mechanics they carried over from the originals, or the remakes, or were completely different from either. In one of the other threads, I said something like "I can't imagine what they'd have to do for these to not be my preferred versions," but here we are. I'd rather play Origins for FFI and II, and I'd rather just... continue not replaying III tbh. Mods can change that eventually though, so we'll see. I still have some hope that the IV-VI will be okay - even though they're much more complex and offer many more opportunities to screw stuff up because of that, they're also much more inline with what people expect from classic Final Fantasy to begin with.
